July 7, 2002

James Boswell was taken aback by Samuel Johnson’s verdict on Gulliver’s travels: “When once you have thought of big men and little men, it is very easy to do all the rest.” So are we — but part of the reason we’re appalled is that while Johnson almost completely misses the point, he has a point. It is about mistrusting fantastic literature’s ability to deliver a moral message.

Not many people would compare Douglas Adams to Swift, but there are worse ways of spending an afternoon. Almost the first joke in The hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy is how humans are so backward that “they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea”. Hardly Swiftian saeva indignatio, but you get the picture almost at once. The world is destroyed, as a gag about demolishing homes for bypasses, almost immediately, by the end of the series, 1992’s Mostly Harmless, Adams has restored the world only to destroy it again, bitterly. I doubt there is a comedy sci-fi work bleaker than Mostly Harmless. Adams thought so, and one of the many sad aspects of his sudden death last year is that there will be no upbeat ending to the series.

Anyway, think up the title The hitchhiker’s etc, and, as Johnson said, it is very easy to do all the rest. You will still need a fertile imagination, a fondness for silly names, a thorough grasp of English zaniness from Wodehouse to Python — and, for best results, experience of writing scripts for Doctor Who, which is as sound a grounding in popular British sci-fi as you could wish for. It also stops you taking yourself too seriously. Compare, for instance, the moronic pomposity of the Star Wars films, the first of which came out at around the same time.

There was excited speculation that The salmon of doubt would contain an unfinished sixth Hitchhiker novel. The front cover boasts the line “Hitchhiking the galaxy one last time”, but it shouldn’t. The eponymous unfinished novel it contains is a Dirk Gently novel. Dirk Gently was a character, you felt, whom Adams dreamed up to show that he wasn’t a one-trick pony. As such the books were partially successful: a skit on the detective genre as his other work was a skit on the sci-fi genre. Gently runs a holistic detective agency, the idea being not so much to look for clues as to allow them to come to you, the fundamental interconnectedness of the universe meaning that everything that crops up will be relevant. And indeed, in the author’s hands, everything is.

But the real skit is on Adams’s own beliefs. As the numerous interviews with him reprinted in The Salmon Of Doubt attest, Adams was a keen logician, a disciple as well as a friend of Richard Dawkins, and a proselytizing atheist. He was tickled by the coincidence that his initials were DNA, and that he was born in Cambridge five months before Crick and Watson discovered the molecule of the same name.

There is an amusing exchange between him and a group with the embattled-sounding name of American atheists, who ask: “Have you faced any obstacles in your professional life because of your atheism (bigotry against atheists), and how did you handle it?” The question suggests that atheist-persecution is a bit of a problem over there. Adams’s reply, which it must have been a pleasure to give: “Not even remotely. It’s an inconceivable idea.”

As is admitted by both Adams and Peter Guzzardi, the editor who put it together, the final Dirk Gently novel collated here doesn’t go anywhere. It may or may not have been cannibalized and salvaged for a further Hitchhiker novel. As it is, Guzzardi had done a good job; Adams’s novels, particularly the Dirk Gently ones, always felt a bit cobbled together, however, much he tried to close things neatly at the end.

You will notice that no one ever asked Adams about whether he believed aliens existed or not; the question would be as preposterous as asking P G Wodehouse what he thought about the English class system. Adams was always writing about this world, and if he got sidetracked into sci-fi comedy the joke was always on us. From The salmon of doubt: “Time travel? ... The evidence is all around us. I’m talking about how every time we make an insurance claim we discover that somehow mysteriously the exact thing we’re claiming for is now precisely excluded from our policy.” —Dawn/ Guardian news service

The salmon of doubt
By Douglas Adams
Macmillan
ISBN 0333766571
336pp £16.99

Please Visit our Sponsor (Ads open in separate window)